“I expected that you would take up arms against me, for your people and mine are enemies to the death; and I knew, too, that the love which I had spurned would not be long in turning to active hate. But you excelled my expectations--you, one of the Princes of the Air, the scion of a race that holds itself above all the other races of the earth, the son of a man who but a few years ago was lord and master of the world! You come in the guise of open and honourable warfare to smirch with your foul lies the fame of a woman for whose sake you made yourself a traitor to your people and a murderer of your own comrades. A pretty story, forsooth, to tell in the ears of my friends and allies. Do you take them for children or fools that you expect them to believe it? “Imagine such a miracle, your Majesty,” she continued, turning, with the clear ring of a mocking laugh in her voice, to the Sultan, “imagine this Alan Arnold, son of the President of Aeria, with his friend and lieutenant, Alexis Masarov, and a crew of eight Aerians on board their flagship, armed with the most tremendous means of destruction ever invented by human genius, and each man of them, moreover, possessing in his own person the power of life and death, as he himself has proved before your own eyes. “These kings among men invite two casual acquaintances for a trip to the clouds, and these two guests, a youth of twenty and a girl not seventeen, unarmed and without assistance, seize their ship, kill eight of their invincibly armed comrades, and lead the captain and his lieutenant away captive. And how? By means of some mysterious drugs, subtle and irresistible poisons, of which such a boy and girl could not possibly have known either the composition or the use, and which they would have been afraid to employ if they had done. “But let me come to the facts as they are,” she went on, turning again to Alan, who stood literally dumfounded before her, amazed beyond power of thought or speech by the audacity of her words. “It is you who are the liar, the traitor, and the murderer. It is you who killed my brother before my eyes because he sought to protect me from your violence; and it is you and your friend Alexis who, of your own free will, struck your comrades dead, threw them out of the air-ship upon the Norwegian snows, and then, in the hope of gaining my favour, took the _Ithuriel_ to Vorobièvo, near Moscow, and delivered her into the hands of my friends. “I have fifty men within call at this moment who will swear that this is true. Orloff Lossenski, you are one of them. Were you not at the villa at Vorobièvo when these two came with me in the _Ithuriel_ and delivered her into your hands; and did you not find the corpse of my brother Serge in one of the state rooms with his neck bruised and blackened by the grip of his murderer?”